Neuroscience

Pinpoint: trajectory planning for multi-probe electrophysiology and injections in an interactive web-based 3D environment

1. Daniel Birman
2. Kenneth J. Yang
3. Steven J. West
4. Bill Karsh
5. Yoni Browning
6. the International Brain Laboratory
7. Joshua H. Siegle
8. Nicholas A. Steinmetz

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  Birman et al. present a valuable software interface, Pinpoint, for planning anatomically precise insertions of rigid instruments (e.g., electrodes, injection needles/pipettes, fibre optic implants) into the mouse brain. The authors provide compelling evidence of the potential of this software since, it: (1) incorporates the geometrical constraints of the rig and instruments; (2) interfaces with popular manipulator systems and data acquisition software; (3) runs on any browser; and (4) allows for easy collaboration among users. Despite these exciting features, quantification of the gains in experimental efficiency and accuracy derived from Pinpoint is needed.

Reviewed by eLife

Modulation of input sensitivity and output gain by retinal amacrine cells

1. Neda Nategh
2. Mihai Manu
3. Stephen A. Baccus

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This paper studies how amacrine cells influence retinal output signals. The approach taken is unusually direct and has the potential to make important contributions to our understanding of amacrine cells, and more generally interneurons, to circuit function. The contributions of the work described, however, are limited by several key concerns. Specifically, the results rely heavily on assumptions made about how signals traverse the retina; as a result, the evidence for adequate separation of signals contributed by the amacrine cells and those from other parallel retinal pathways is incomplete.

Reviewed by eLife

Identification of a convergent spinal neuron population that encodes itch

1. Tayler D. Sheahan
2. Charles A. Warwick
3. Abby Y. Cui
4. David A.A. Baranger
5. Vijay J. Perry
6. Kelly M. Smith
7. Allison P. Manalo
8. Eileen K. Nguyen
9. H. Richard Koerber
10. Sarah E. Ross

Reviewed by Arcadia Science

A meta-analysis of the effect of protein synthesis inhibitors on rodent fear conditioning

1. Clarissa F. D. Carneiro
2. Felippe E. Amorim
3. Olavo B. Amaral

Reviewed by Peer Community in Neuroscience

Temporally specific gene expression and chromatin remodeling programs regulate a conserved Pdyn enhancer

1. Robert A Phillips
2. Ethan Wan
3. Jennifer J Tuscher
4. David Reid
5. Olivia R Drake
6. Lara Ianov
7. Jeremy J Day

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This is an important study that uses chromatin accessibility as a measure to determine the impact of neuronal activity on the state of chromatin regulatory elements in striatal neurons. The authors provide convincing evidence of how Pdyn gene expression is highly dependent on a distal regulatory genomic region both at basal and upon neuronal activation in this particular system, a mechanism conserved as well in human neuronal cells. Although the basic idea of accessibility changes have been studied before, this paper ties previous findings all together in one place and uses the analysis to identify a functionally relevant and conserved enhancer for the prodynorphin gene with potential relevance for neuropsychiatric disorders beyond basic cellular neuroscience. The study will be of interest to neuroscientists studying the striatum, neuronal plasticity, or related neuropsychiatric disorders.

Reviewed by eLife

Asymmetric inheritance of centrosomes maintains stem cell properties in human neural progenitor cells

1. Lars N Royall
2. Diana Machado
3. Sebastian Jessberger
4. Annina Denoth-Lippuner

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This manuscript reports important findings in the field of developmental neurobiology, particularly in our understanding of human cortical development. The methods, data, and analyses are solid yet, the lack of clonal resolution or timelapse imaging makes it hard to assess whether the inheritance of centrosomes occurs as the authors claim.

Reviewed by eLife

ACC neural ensemble dynamics are structured by strategy prevalence

1. Mikhail Proskurin
2. Maxim Manakov
3. Alla Karpova

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This manuscript posits a novel role for the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) in coding for sequential action strategies and the prevalence of each strategy. These findings provide important insight into ACC function and will therefore be of broad interest within the field of cognitive neuroscience. The evidence supporting the primary hypothesis is currently incomplete but could be rendered convincing with some further effort to rule out potential confounding factors.

Reviewed by eLife

Evaluation of surface-based hippocampal registration using ground-truth subfield definitions

1. Jordan DeKraker
2. Nicola Palomero-Gallagher
3. Olga Kedo
4. Neda Ladbon-Bernasconi
5. Sascha EA Muenzing
6. Markus Axer
7. Katrin Amunts
8. Ali R Khan
9. Boris C Bernhardt
10. Alan C Evans

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This paper presents an important contribution to the field of hippocampal registration by introducing a novel surface-based approach that utilizes the topological and morphological features of the hippocampus for anatomical registration across individuals, rather than volumetric-based methods commonly used in the literature. The study provides compelling evidence for the efficacy of this approach using histological samples from three different datasets and offers validation of the method through comparison with traditional volumetric registration. This is significant work given the large number of studies that examine hippocampal shape, thickness, and function in large cohorts, providing strong support for the use of hippocampal unfolding methods in future studies.

Reviewed by eLife

Event-related modulation of alpha rhythm explains the auditory P300-evoked response in EEG

1. Alina Studenova
2. Carina Forster
3. Denis Alexander Engemann
4. Tilman Hensch
5. Christian Sanders
6. Nicole Mauche
7. Ulrich Hegerl
8. Markus Loffler
9. Arno Villringer
10. Vadim Nikulin

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  This is valuable study on the mechanistic relationship between two prominent events in post-stimulus EEG: alpha desynchronization and P300 that are known for their slow/relatively late build up. The sample size is substantial. The data are compelling, showing that the P300 can be explained by desynchronization of a non-zero mean alpha oscillations over posterior sites through the baseline-shift model, at least partially. This makes a significant contribution to understanding and interpreting P300 generation (and possibly other ERP components) from concurrent changes in brain oscillations, with links to cognition.

Reviewed by eLife

Adaptive biasing of action-selective cortical build-up activity by stimulus history

1. Anke Braun
2. Tobias H Donner

• Curated by eLife

  eLife assessment

  In uncertain conditions, decisions are not made in isolation but are rather biased by the recent past. This new work provides valuable insights into these history biases in human perceptual decision-making, by characterizing the neural correlates of stimulus history biases and their short-term dynamics. The study provides compelling behavioral and MEG evidence that humans adapt their history biases to the correlation structure of uncertain sensory environments.

Reviewed by eLife